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Mark your calendars, e-book fans: Amazon.com will introduce the next generation of its popular Kindle reader in New York City on Feb. 9.

The company sent out e-mail messages Tuesday announcing a news conference on that date at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. Amazon.com confirmed that its founder and chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, would host the event.

Amazon would not comment in any more detail about the coming announcement, but the Kindle’s detail page on Amazon.com tells the story. It now says the electronic book reader will ship in four to six weeks. It previously suggested a wait of 11 to 13 weeks.

The device has been out of stock since November, after Oprah Winfrey touted it on her show. The announcement seems to confirm our suspicions that the original Kindle has been obsolete since that time and that everyone who purchased the device over the holidays from Amazon.com — or put their name on a waiting list — will receive the newer version

Publishers Weekly reports that Amazon.com has notified its publisher and author clients that it plans to cease offering e-books in the Microsoft Reader and Adobe e-book formats.

In the future, the online retailer says it plans to offer only e-books in the Kindle format (for wireless download to its Kindle reading device) and the Mobipocket format, both of which are owned by Amazon. The online retailer’s note asks publishers and authors to make sure that Amazon has written permission to offer their books for sale in the Mobipocket format.

Seeking to be everything to everyone, Nintendo is set to launch the 100 Classic Book Collection for the Nintendo DS. Since it’s UK-specific, the cartridge with cost £20 (US$30) and will headline dead British authors William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and more. Presumably, if British consumers are willing to shell out £20 for a collection of public domain works, Nintendo will release similar collections around the globe.

Could book lovers finally be willing to switch from paper to pixels? Some could...but others, to quote the Times, "maintain an almost fetishistic devotion to the physical book".

According to the New York Times "the ebook is starting to take hold". Many Kindle buyers appear to be outside the usual gadget-hound demographic. Almost as many women as men are buying it, Mr. Hildick-Smith, president of the Codex group said, and the device is most popular among 55- to 64-year-olds. Codex is a book market research company.

Nobody knows how much consumer habits will shift. But the technology may have more appeal for particular kinds of people, like those who are the heaviest readers.

Perhaps the most overlooked boost to e-books this year — and a challenge to some of the standard thinking about them — came from Apple’s do-it-all gadget, the iPhone. Several e-book-reading programs have been created for the device, and at least two of them, Stanza from LexCycle and the eReader from Fictionwise, have been downloaded more than 600,000 times. Another company, Scroll Motion, announced this week that it would begin selling e-books for the iPhone from major publishers like Simon & Schuster, Random House and Penguin.

All of these companies say they are now tailoring their software for other kinds of smartphones, including BlackBerrys.

"Nintendo, the Japanese video games company that brought us Donkey Kong and Mario the Plumber, is to announce a deal with the publisher HarperCollins today to make literary classics available to read on its DS portable games consoles.

For the physical design, it looks ugly, it feels flimsy, and seems a bit tacky. You can’t even hold the device in your hand without accidently pushing one of the buttons. It’s not a case of having sausage fingers, it’s more the palms of your hands which end up mashing the buttons. Whilst I’m aware this is a technology website, I never thought I’d recommend people stick to their books rather than a device which is meant to revolutionise reading.